Dancing in the Streets



I was intrigued when our book group selected Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich.  It’s a history of collective joy and ecstatic ritual — stuff that’s pretty rare in the land of the glowing screen people.  Studying humankind’s long transition from wild and free to robo-consumers, it’s easy to perceive gradually advancing emotional decay.  Cultures slid further away from intimate connections to the family of life, and human societies grew from small clans of friends and family into sprawling megalopolises inhabited by millions of strangers.

In Colin Turnbull’s lovely book, The Forest People, the Mbuti Pygmies were beautiful people who thrived in a Congo rainforest.  They did not worship invisible deities, because that required a vivid imagination.  Instead, they had profound reverence and respect for their forest, which was not invisible, and gave them everything they needed.  This love often inspired song, dance, and jubilation.  Paradise was where their feet were standing.  Turnbull wrote that the Pygmy “likes to laugh until tears come to his eyes and he is too weak to stand.  He then sits down or lies on the ground and laughs still louder.”

In The Mbuti Pygmies, Turnbull spoke fondly of Father Longo, a Catholic missionary.  Pygmies had no word for evil.  “In order to convert them, then, he would first have to teach them the concept of evil, and that he was not prepared to do.”  He left them unmolested.

I had great hopes for Ehrenreich’s book, because it was a very neat idea.  I imagined a book to help us remember how essential it was, for health and sanity, to spend our lives in intimate daily contact with the family of life, in a thriving undefiled ecosystem — the mode of living for which we evolved.  The book didn’t quite do this.  Its time window was the era of civilization, beginning with brief glimpses of Canaanite orgies, and the lusty Dionysian cults of Greece.  The main focus was on Europe in the last 500 years.

For most, life in medieval times majored in backbreaking drudgery and poverty.  Folks avoided insanity by taking breaks for festive gatherings — carnivals where people wore costumes and masks.  There was singing, dancing, drinking, and good-natured mockery of their superiors.  The struggles of daily life were left behind, as peasants and nobles joined together, rolled down their socks, and dissolved into a sweet whirlwind of joyful noise and ecstatic celebration.

There were big cultural changes when puritanical cults appeared on the stage, with their fanatical intolerance.  Calvinism descended like a hard frost on fun.  Pleasure was of the devil.  Festivities were banned.  The music stopped.  Get back to work!  Naturally, this led to an epidemic of morbid melancholy (depression).

Over time, multinational salvation-oriented religions drove wedges into cohesive social relationships.  Believers were encouraged to regularly contemplate their shortcomings, and worry about where their souls would reside in the afterlife.  There was increased focus on “me,” the individual, and less on “us,” our community.  With the rise of individualism came “isolation, loneliness, a sense of disengagement, loss of vitality, and a feeling of burden because reality had no clear meaning.”

Then came the age of colonization, when this injured mindset spread to distant lands, forced its beliefs on others, and destroyed their cultures.  Missionaries were rigid, racist, domineering, and intolerant — dour and cheerless people who never laughed.  Savages were no longer allowed to practice their traditional ecstatic rituals, because they were devil worship.  Joy became a mental illness.

Ehrenreich wrote in 2007, but her chapter on the rise of fascist nationalism could have been written this morning.  Following their defeat in 1918, Germans were down and out.  Hitler revived their spirits with mysticism, color, and pageantry.  Hitler was a masterful performer and bullshit artist who entranced vast crowds with his highly animated oratory, repeatedly shouting slogan after slogan.  Thousands roared back, “Sieg heil!” [LOOK]

The Nazis built an enormous stadium at Nuremberg, and held annual gatherings in it.  Around the perimeter, 130 antiaircraft searchlights were aimed straight up into the night, creating an awe-inspiring circular colonnade of light beams. Folks were spellbound by the sight of thousands of soldiers, in crisp new uniforms, goose-stepping with astonishing precision, to the thundering drumbeats.

Like the Pied Piper, Hitler tried to unify and lead all good Germans to a heroic racially pure Teutonic utopia.  On the streets, gangs of roughneck brown shirts with swastika armbands aggressively harassed the socialists, Jews, and other undesirables.  The swing music of racially inferior Negroes was banned.  Radio and cinema reinforced the Third Reich’s message — make the Fatherland great again.

Military spectacles were a powerful way to manipulate crowds.  The barrage of high energy nationalism whipped them up.  But being orderly spectators was far less interesting than enthusiastically participating in singing, dancing, and merrymaking.  Nazi events were heavily policed.  Eventually, the parades and speeches got boring.

After the Hitler show was reduced to rubble, Ehrenreich discussed two new fads that seemed like modern attempts to revive ecstatic rituals — rock music, and sporting events.  In the ’60s, the Western world seemed to snap out of its brittle Puritan trance, get up, and dance.  White kids discovered what black folks had known for a long time — tune into the beat and shake those hips.  Letting yourself go led to ecstatic experiences.  At Beatles concerts, the music was often drowned out by the intense screaming and shrieking of thousands of girls. 

At football and soccer games, crowds quit being passive spectators.  Events took on carnival characteristics.  They put on costumes with their team colors, and painted their faces.  There were synchronized crowd movements, chants, dancing, feasting, and singing.  Eventually, the crowds got so loud and distracting that the players on the field complained.  Over time, games began to increasingly take on aspects of nationalistic military spectacles.  There were marching bands, precision drill teams, celebrities, loud music, flag waving, national anthems, and fireworks.

Modern psychology is focused on self-control, being a dependable human resource in an industrial society.  Old fashioned communal festivities were focused on escape from routines, losing the self, and becoming one with the soaring ecstasy of big joy.  I wish that Ehrenreich had invited Jacob Grimm into her story.  Long, long before the plague of Puritans, Europeans had deep roots in their ancestral lands, places that were spiritually alive with sacred groves, streams, mountains, animals, and fairies.  In Teutonic Mythology, Grimm described annual German bonfires:

“At all the cities, towns, and villages of a country, towards evening on the first (or third) day of Easter, there is lighted every year on mountain and hill a great fire of straw, turf, and wood, amidst a concourse and jubilation, not only of the young, but of many grown up peoples.  …Men and maids, and all who come, dance exulting and singing, hats are waved, handkerchiefs thrown into the fire.  The mountains all round are lighted up, and it is an elevating spectacle, scarcely paralleled by anything else, to survey the country for many miles round from one of the higher points, and in every direction at once to see a vast number of these bonfires, brighter or fainter, blazing up to heaven.” 

At Midsummer, there were wheels of fire rituals.  “A huge wheel is wrapt around with straw, so that none of the wood is left in sight, a strong pole is passed through the middle, and is grasped by the guiders of the wheel.  At a signal… the wheel is lighted with a torch, and set rapidly in motion, a shout of joy is raised, and all wave their torches on high, part of the men stay on the hill, part follow the rolling globe of fire as it is guided downhill to the Moselle.  …Whilst the wheel is rushing past the women and girls, they break out into cries of joy, answered by the men on the hill; and inhabitants of neighboring villages, who have flocked to the river side, mingle their voices in the universal rejoicing.”

In the old days, white folks still knew how to party like Pygmies.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2007.

Grimm, Jacob, Teutonic Mythology, 4 vols, 1883, Reprint, Peter Smith, Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1976.

Tribe



Sebastian Junger’s bestselling book Tribe is fascinating and perplexing.  He’s a journalist who has covered a number of armed conflicts.  As a result of these experiences, he’s developed an admiration for war and warriors, because chaos brings out the best in people.  It creates an alternate reality in which it is acceptable and desirable to behave like human beings (sort of).

During times of helter-skelter, people shift into a tribal mode.  Divisive stuff, like race, religion, and politics, are largely swept under the bed.  Emotional disagreements over beliefs that are irrelevant to the immediate situation can get everyone killed — the opposite of the preferred outcome.  In chaos, people share, cooperate, care for others, and abandon class roles.  The tribal mindset feels pleasantly natural and satisfying, a refreshing change.  They cease being the isolated individuals that industrial society excels at mass producing.

In combat, warriors become capable of great courage and great cruelty.  They transform into fearless beings of holy rage who laugh in the face of death.  “They wore amulets and magical charms and acted as if they were possessed, deliberately running into gunfire and dancing while firing their weapons.”  They were intensely and absolutely alive (sort of).

This reminded me of stories about wild European warriors.  Berzerkers were sometimes swept away by a state of fury they could not turn off.  They killed everyone in sight, even friends.  In Ireland, Cu Chulainn was so overheated with battle rage that a group of naked women was sent out to calm him.  He was put in vats of cold water, which boiled and evaporated.

Junger noted that when a deployment ends, warriors plunge down a chute, back to consumer oblivion.  They return to “a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good.”  It’s a sharp slap on the face.  Equality comes to an abrupt end, class roles resume, and some brave warriors once again have to move to the back of the bus, work crap jobs, and suffer the arrogant rudeness of petty tyrants.  It immediately becomes apparent that the society that they had fought to protect is insane.

Back in consumer wonderland, herds of strangers, blissed out on antidepressants, devote total attention to tiny glowing screens.  Roads are jammed with frantic reckless drivers who have no sense of courtesy or common decency.  Alpha consumers proudly posture beside their shiny $50,000 pickup trucks and pretentious McMansions.  It’s like a loony zoo for primates born in captivity.  Warriors feel completely out of place.  Many snap.  Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is common. 

Junger is fond of American Indian tribes, because they honored and respected warriors, and performed ceremonies to help them successfully reintegrate into civilian society.  The mindset of modern warriors has elements in common with the tribal cultures of wild societies.  Humans have a powerful desire to be close to others.  Hunter-gatherers learned to share food, help one another, promptly resolve conflicts, and cooperate in team hunting and group defense.  Self-centered individualists were annoying pariahs, because they were a threat to group stability.

Junger reminds readers of colonial times, when whites captured by Indians actually preferred living in the wild society of their captors.  Many refused to return to rigid Christian society, even when begged by relatives.  This was so common that laws were passed that prohibited settlers from abandoning their communities and voluntarily choosing to live in tribal freedom.

Page one asserts that the white colonizers were aggressively conquering Stone Age Indians who had barely changed technologically in 15,000 years.  I disagree.  During the colonization process, Indians acquired horses, guns, and metal tools.  Horses dramatically cranked up the velocity and intensity of warfare, enabling the rise of the Comanche empire.  Hunting on horseback made it much easier to kill bison, which increased the possibility of overhunting and population growth.

The three sisters system of agriculture (corn, squash, beans) began expanding around 800 A.D., following several centuries of experimentation.  It allowed far more nutrients to be extracted from the same land area.  This led to surging population, increased conflict, mutual defense alliances, hierarchical chiefdoms, and large villages surrounded by rugged wooden palisades.  Junger mentions that the Iroquois empire dominated just about every tribe within 500 miles (804 km).

Tribal towns emerged at Cahokia, Illinois; Spiro, Oklahoma; Moundville, Alabama; and Etowah, Georgia.  Each invested many years of manual labor in building monumental earthworks.  Mound 72 at Cahokia contained the bodies of 52 young women, sacrificed in some way that did not leave marks on their bones. Their bodies had been stacked in two tidy layers.  South of the border, in the motherland of corn, Aztecs apparently sacrificed thousands of people every year.

Junger’s short book often feels like a supertanker of testosterone.  It feels like its primary message was a celebration of war, warriors, and tribal culture.  But anthropologists tell us that war is not a normal component for all tribes.  There have been many exceptions, and these cultures did not domesticate grains, or enslave horses or livestock.

I had a flash of excitement when Junger briefly mentioned the !Kung people of the Kalahari, the northern group of the San hunter-gatherers.  Louis Lieberman noted that the San are genetically among of the oldest modern humans.  Their hunting culture survived into the 1950s, and may have survived continuously for 200,000 years or more.  They possess all the positive characteristics of tribal people, minus the warrior tradition.

Junger’s book devotes abundant attention to the holiness of warriors.  Do you think the pathology of modern society could be cured by becoming more war oriented?  The book devotes far less attention to the creepy soul-killing civilian culture that warriors hated returning to.  Modern societies fail to provide a way of life that is comfortable, normal, and natural for primates.  We weren’t meant to live like neurotic caged animals amidst crowds of strangers in sprawling concrete metropolises.

The book’s subtitle is “On Homecoming and Belonging.”  Home is far more than a group of humans.  Even more important, home is also a place that supports a complex family of life — wild life.  From what I gather, Junger grew up in Boston, and has spent most of his adult years in New York City.  I sense that he, along with most Americans, has never experienced a healthy lifelong spiritual connection to a healthy wild ecosystem.  We are a society of lost and lonely homeless critters.

If this disconnection does not change, we can have no long term future.  Modern societies are possessed by a collective trance — an overwhelming blind faith in technological miracles, perpetual growth, and endless progress.  We are the greatest, and the best is yet to come!  It will take a profound cultural awakening to break out of this toxic trance.  Junger scores points for pointing out how dysfunctional our society is.  In order to successfully break the spell of powerful illusions, millions more need to join him in delegitimizing the black magic juju.

What’s missing is a heartfelt celebration of wildness, and the powerful medicine of healthy connection.  Also missing is a deeper discussion of the conflicts he reported on.  In two sentences, Junger mentions that he did not support the Vietnam War, or the Iraq War.  So, on the battlefields, young warriors learned some beneficial aspects of tribal relationships.  But the warriors were risking their lives to participate in wars that were not justified — wars that should never been started.  Might there be better ways of learning how to have healthy relationships with the family of life?

Junger, Sebastian, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Twelve Books, New York, 2016.

The Mountain People



Anthropologist Colin Turnbull was born London in 1924, and raised in a surreal upper class family, which he described in his important book, The Human Cycle.  World War Two jolted the pampered lad into the bloody real world.  In the 1950s, he spent lots of time in the Congo, with the Mbuti Pygmies, who inspired his masterpiece, The Forest People.  It was a beautiful life-changing experience to live with healthy, happy humans who were profoundly in love with their sacred forest — nothing like the zombies of England.

When war in the Congo zapped his plans for another visit, he accepted an assignment to learn about the Ik tribe in northeastern Uganda.  The government wanted a plan for transforming them into law-abiding taxpaying farmers.  For unknown thousands of years, they had been hunter-gatherers in the Kidepo Valley, an arid mountainous savannah.

In 1962, their traditional lands became a 540 square mile (1,399 sq km) wildlife preserve, the Kidepo Valley National Park.  Hunting was banned, and the Ik were moved into the mountains.  They were expected to magically shape shift into farmers in a region that experienced droughts about one in every four years.  Turnbull’s study ran from 1965 to 1967, and the first two years were back-to-back droughts.  Crops withered in the fields, the granaries were empty, and about 2,000 people began to starve.  Turnbull described the cultural meltdown in The Mountain People. 

Turnbull wrote, “The hunter and gatherer gives little thought for the morrow, getting his feed fresh, from day to day, with the ready assurance of someone who has come to terms with the world around him.  He knows the world he lives in as few others do, and he lives in sympathy with it, rather than trying to dominate it.”  A farmer can lose a year’s work in one night.  A hunter can only lose a day’s work.

When he first got there, the famine was just beginning.  Two months later, the horror began.  People became totally self-centered.  Their two interests in life were now food and water.  Most became habitual liars, and most took every opportunity steal Turnbull’s stuff.  They pulled many juvenile pranks on him, hoping for him to get hurt or die.  “The people were as unfriendly, uncharitable, inhospitable, and generally mean as any people can be.”  They laughed hard at anyone’s misfortunes.  It was amusing to steal food from the feeble, and push them down.

Upon being weaned at age three, youngsters were thrown out of their parents’ house.  Evicted children formed bands and wandered the countryside looking for something to eat.  Lucky ones found some figs, the unlucky ate dirt and pebbles, and soon died.  Feeding children and elders, who couldn’t take care of themselves, was a foolish waste of precious nutrients.

Turnbull was often scolded for his idiotic generosity.  He was feeding folks who were soon to be dead, cruelly prolonging their misery.  Adults refused to feed their starving parents, or let them into their house.  When they died, most were quickly buried in the family compound, in secrecy.  If the villagers found out, they would expect a funeral ceremony, which required a feast.

Famines were a crappy time to be born.  Nobody was happy to see you, nobody cared.  When out foraging, mothers put their babies down roughly, and didn’t watch them carefully.  Maybe a hungry leopard would relieve her of her little bummer.  One time, a leopard ate a baby.  Sleepy from a delicious meal, the cat laid down for nice nap.  Men found it, killed it, and ate it, baby and all.

Turnbull once took pity on an old woman who was close to death.  He wanted to create a new village, where the abandoned people could be properly cared for.  She was not interested.  She wanted to die near her son, who would not take care of her.  Turnbull fed her, and gave her some food.  She burst into tears, because this triggered memories of “a time when people had helped each other, when people had been kind and good.”  She was the last survivor who remembered the good old days.

Stuff like this fills most of the book.  Turnbull spent 18 months eating by himself in his Range Rover.  For some reason, he got the blues.  He hoped “that we who have been civilized into such empty beliefs as the essential beauty and goodness of humanity may discover ourselves before it is too late.”  “Most of us are unlikely to admit readily that we can sink as low as the Ik, but many of us do, and with far less cause.”  Whoa!

I first read The Mountain People in 2001, and it snapped my mind.  It was an unforgettable book that you wished you could forget.  I was blindsided by the misery, cruelty, and horror, and this was the impression that I took away from the book.  In 2017, I read the book a second time, and it blew me away again, for another reason.  Near the end of the book, Turnbull shared some troubling conclusions that I was too dazed to grasp in my first reading.  He held up a mirror, so his well-fed readers could see their own deformities, and get their noses rubbed in them.

Having spent years with the Mbuti, he had directly experienced a healthy functional society.  Before that, he had grown to adulthood in twentieth century Western society, a world of atomic bombs, concentration camps, and the brutal extermination of tens of millions.  It was the opposite of a functional society.  It had become pathologically individualized and de-socialized — similar to the Ik, and in many ways worse.  The Ik give us a taste of our days to come.

“We pursue those trivial, idiotic technological encumbrances and imagine them to be the luxuries that make life worth living, and all the time we are losing our potential for social rather than individual survival, for hating as well as loving, losing perhaps our last chance to enjoy life with all the passion that is our nature and being.”  Today, Americans speed down the highways in their motorized wheelchairs while the polar ice melts, and monster hurricanes obliterate societies.  Sorry kids!

Here is a comment, from 45 years ago, that could have been written today.  “The state itself, is resting ever more on both intellectual and physical violence to assert itself.”  Heads of state and their assistants fill the air with “loud-mouthed anti-intellectual blabberings.”  The populace learns not to believe, trust, love, hope, or think.

The Mbuti enjoyed a society harmonized by a common set of beliefs, values, and lifestyles.  Everyone was on the same channel.  Our society is a cranky boisterous mob of numerous competing cultures, classes, and religious beliefs.  “In larger-scale societies we are accustomed to diversity of belief, we even applaud ourselves for our tolerance, not recognizing that a society not bound together by a single powerful belief is not a society at all, but a political association of individuals held together only by the presence of law and force — the existence of which is a violence.” 

Love is not a hardwired function, like breathing.  It has to be learned.  When love is not reciprocated, it dies.  The Ik demonstrated that love can go extinct.  When lonely consumers are starving for love in modern society, many choose to purchase companions. “The keeping of pets, which is one of the characteristics special to civilization, indicates a deterioration in human relationships.”

The Ik were excessively individualistic, spending their days in solitude and boredom, rarely forming significant relationships.  Each one was alone, and content to be alone.  Turnbull often sat with Ik men on a ridge overlooking the valley, gazing into space.  Day after day, all day long, not a word was ever spoken.  This reminds me of the spooky smart phone cult in my town today.  People gather around tables in a café, each silently gazing at their glowing screens.

The Ik expelled their children from home at age three.  Westerners wait until kindergarten, when the kids begin their decades of institutionalization.  The state now oversees health, education, and welfare.  We are indoctrinated with an “individualism that is preached with a curious fanaticism.”  This radical individualism “is reflected in our cutthroat economics, where almost anything is justified in terms of an expanding economy and the consequent confinement of the world’s riches in the pockets of the few.”

When it was released in 1972, The Mountain People got a lot of attention.  Immediately, hordes of dignified scholars explosively soiled their britches.  Heresy!  The Ik were nothing but an extreme exception, a bizarre mutation!  Civilized humans are moral and virtuous!  We are the greatest!

Turnbull, Colin M., The Mountain People, Touchstone, New York, 1972.

HERE is a 5-minute video about Colin Turnbull and the Mbuti.  The narrator says, “His advisor at Oxford wrote that Colin Turnbull is tall, fair, handsome, impulsive, and elusive.  All his screws are loose, real communication with him seems impossible.  Perhaps one has to belong to one of the backwards races in order to get his wavelength.”

A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy

The Industrial Revolution blew the lid off Pandora’s Box, releasing a poisonous whirlwind of evils into the world.  Millions of rural people were herded into vast, filthy, disease-ridden cities to live among hordes of strangers, perform miserable work, and die young.  It was pure hell, and many people snapped.  Insane asylums began popping up like mushrooms, and the psychotherapy industry was born. 

In Vienna, Freud kept busy treating hysterical Austrians, and Jung worked with “schizy” inmates at a Zürich asylum.  They launched an insurgency against European Puritanism, a mindset that drove many out of their minds — desire was bad, and punctual, robotic conformity to a system of pleasure-free maximum productivity was the compulsory objective.

So, the first wave of psychotherapy was radical and rebellious, but a second wave that emerged in the ‘50s has been regressive.  The new mode purported that newborns were pure, innocent, blank slates.  Once born, the beautiful, helpless “inner child” was vulnerable to abuse from others that could knock it off balance, sometimes permanently. 

In the therapy room, attention was focused on the patient’s past — a hunt for abuse that may have happened decades ago.  Mental illness was usually the result of a screwed up childhood, and it was believed to reside within the patient.  The endless bombardment of dark influences from the surrounding insane society was off the radar.  The goal of mainstream therapy was helping wounded patients adapt to living in an insane society.  Mainstream therapists now practice everywhere in America.

James Hillman (1926-2011) was a student of Jung, and once served as the director of the C. G. Jung Institute.  Over the years, he became a vocal critic of modern psychotherapy.  In his opinion, newborns were not blank slates, and they were not born whole and perfect — they were unique acorns with a calling and a destiny, tuned into the voices of their ancestors.  

He thought that mainstream therapy was turning the educated middle class into docile plebes, trained to “cope (and not protest), to adapt (and not rebel) to… make it work for you (rather than refuse the unacceptable).”  He strongly believed that the therapy room should become a cell of revolution.  Patients needed to become involved in the insane world, and transform it into a healthier place for all life.  Aim at the core of the problem, not the side effects.

Michael Ventura (born 1945) was a popular journalist for the trendy L.A. Weekly.  He had abundant experience as a consumer of therapy.  Mental illness was a significant theme in his family history.  Most of the people he knew were either in therapy, practicing therapists, or both.  At the same time, he saw that most marriages and relationships around him were dysfunctional to varying degrees.  How could this be, at the zenith of human progress?

In 1990, he interviewed Hillman, and the article generated abundant buzz.  This inspired them to do a book: We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — And the World’s Getting Worse.  It’s a scrapbook of interviews, conversations, and written correspondence, an informal jam session of passionate ideas.  Their two minds soar and play, and the result is a stimulating duet.  The book was published prior to the Prozac Revolution.

According to Jung, “individuation” was the ideal destination — the lifelong process of becoming more and more who you are.  (He also said: “The most terrifying thing is to know yourself.”)  Individuation involved throwing overboard the stuff that was not who you are.  This shifted us from a realm of comfortable habits to unfamiliar territory, where growth was more likely to happen.  When we strayed onto a path where we didn’t belong, our inner life force sent us clear warning messages, “symptoms” (anxiety, depression, etc.).  Hillman said, “Only the unconscious can save us: in your pathology is your salvation.” 

It’s wacky to help people adjust to living in an insane society, to stifle their healthy resistance, and encourage their submission.  Hillman denounced “therapeutic Puritanism,” with its psychic numbing and sensual numbing.  America had been anaesthetized by the Puritan mindset.  “Just look at our land — this continent’s astonishing beauty — and then look at what we immigrants, Bibles in hand, priests and preachers in tow, have done to it.”

The authors linked the rise of mental illness to the rise of individualism and its shadows, alienation and oppression.  For them, the psyche did not live inside the individual, the individual dwelled within the vast timeless collective psyche, like a fish in the ocean.  In the good old days, life was tribal and communal.  Spirituality embraced all sacred beings, animate and inanimate.  Both feet were firmly planted in a stable sense of time and place.  Life was rich with meaning, power, and beauty.  Ventura suspected that “the quality of wholeness is not located in the individual but in a community that includes the environment.”

Christianism blindsided the ancient balance with its new concept of individual salvation.  Suddenly, the creator of the entire universe was paying around-the-clock attention to ME — watching everything I did, continuously reading my mind, and remembering all of my errors.

Following Columbus, the disintegration of ancient balance went into warp drive.  Europeans, their slaves, and the people they conquered were uprooted and scattered across the planet.  The social glue of ancient cultures dissolved.  “Nothing needed to be permanent anymore.”

In the last hundred years, life has gone totally crazy.  Our sense of time and place has vaporized.  Ventura called it “the avalanche.”  We lived in an era of “simultaneous, massive changes on every level of life everywhere, that have built up unstoppable momentum as they speed us toward God knows where.”  Obviously, we’re heading for disaster.  “You can’t negotiate with an avalanche.  Nothing, nothing, nothing is going to stop the shipwreck of this civilization.”

Understand that the world is not ending, just this pathological civilization.  We should not regret its passing, but honor its death with song.  The good news here is that “I” am not sick, my society is.  The good news is that the sick society is busy dying, setting the stage for rebirth and renewal.  Hillman: “Any major change requires a breakdown.”  The next century or two may be rough, but it won’t last forever.  “The only solution can come when the world is reanimated, when we recognize how alive everything is, and how desirable.”

What should we do?  In a nutshell, two things are essential.  (1) We cannot move toward healing without the power of imagination.  Imagination allows us to break out of ruts, overcome barriers, and see farther, with greater clarity.  It strengthens our ability to envision a healthier future.  (2) Individualism is a toxic ball and chain, and we need to leave it behind, in the rubble of the past.  We must remember community living and rejoin the family of life.

Ventura said it like this: “You don’t %@&# around.  You don’t waste your life trying to find a secure place in the avalanche, ‘cause there ain’t no such animal.  You do the work of the soul.”  He told his son, “If you wanted to volunteer for fascinating, dangerous, necessary work, this would be a great job to volunteer for — trying to be a wide-awake human during a Dark Age and keeping alive what you think is beautiful and important.”

Hillman, James and Ventura, Michael, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy — And the World’s Getting Worse, Harper Collins, New York, 1992.  http://www.michaelventura.org/

The Human Cycle

The anthropologist Colin Turnbull (1924-1994) was born into an upper class family in England.  His mother did not breast feed him because of the “health risks.”  He was raised by a long string of nannies.  His father was distant and rarely spoke to him.  His brother lived in a separate nursery, and had other nannies.  Colin really wanted to get to know him, but never did.  He was forbidden to visit portions of the house where his parents, brother, and the servants lived.  When Colin was twelve, his last nanny was fired, and he finally got to spend some time with his parents. 

Following school, he graduated from Oxford University, attended Banaras Hindu University in India, became an anthropologist, spent several years living with the Mbuti Pygmies, wrote books, and became a Buddhist monk before dying of AIDS.  He had a life of prosperity and privilege, but his journey from infancy to adulthood was painful and left permanent emotional scars. 

The Pygmies blew his mind, because their social system was far better, in many ways, than the Western way of life.  Observing them, it was easy to comprehend what a dysfunctional upbringing he had received from his dysfunctional society and family.  Near the end of his life, Turnbull wrote a powerful book, The Human Cycle.  It examined the ways that people in different societies progressed through the phases of life — childhood, adolescence, youth, adulthood, and old age.

Pygmy culture relied on their ancient traditions for guiding people through life in an optimal way, with generous servings of self-confidence, integrity, happiness, and fall-down-laughing gaiety.  Western societies were skilled at producing damaged people.  We tend to regard our childhood as a golden age of innocence and joy — before we’re shipped off to dreary schools, jobs, and nursing homes.  The Pygmies did not idolize childhood, “because, for them, the world has remained a place of wonder, and the older they get the greater the wonder.”  Imagine that.

The Pygmies taught their children everything they needed in order to thrive in their sacred forest, especially a strong sense of social consciousness — “we” not “I.”  Sharing, cooperation, and conflict avoidance were core skills.  But Western education was more like a factory where heads were filled with knowledge.  Students spent years faithfully absorbing facts and dogmas without questioning them.  The goal was to produce aggressive, competitive, self-absorbed individualists.  “It would have been good training for a life in prison.”

The Pygmies performed rituals of initiation, which ceremonially transformed adolescents into adults.  A vital component of this process was reintegration, when the new adults were returned to their community, where they would remain for life.  Each young man built a new hut.  When Western youths graduated, they bypassed reintegration, and were shot from a cannon into the outer world.  They often left behind their family and friends, and spent their lives in urban isolation, with little connection to their neighbors.  Because their initiation was unfinished, it was common for them to suffer from terminal adolescence.

Westerners formally practiced religion once a week, which focused on beliefs and rituals.  The Pygmies lived every minute of their lives in a shimmering world of spiritual power.  They were at one with the forest, the source of their existence, and they regarded it with complete adoration.  The forest was heaven.  Humans were sacred members of the family of life, not masters, managers, or stewards.  They enjoyed a complete lack of religious freedom — everyone was on the same channel, unified by the same belief system — zero conflicts.  Turnbull once said that the Pygmies were without evil and infinitely wise.

Western society teaches us that sex is naughty, shameful, dirty, sinful, and disgustingly bad.  At a school for the upper class, Turnbull watched in horror as a boy was gang raped by other students.  The Pygmy initiation process taught boys and girls about the joys of sacred sex.  Premarital sexual relationships were normal, healthy, and not promiscuous.  Curiosity about sex was “encouraged to flower into exuberance.”

In the Western world, adulthood usually majored in work, and minored in play — and work was often miserable, soul-killing drudgery required for survival.  In the Pygmy world, it’s hard to see a clear boundary between work and play.  The vital task of maintaining social harmony required generous amounts of singing and dancing, followed by gathering ripe fruit, or hunting, or fireside chats, or teaching the children.

Westerners sent their old folks off to retirement homes when they became a drag on the independence of their children — away from regular contact with family, friends, and other age groups — away to a place where they had nothing to do, “a pre-death limbo.”  Retirement denied the elderly of the joys of old age.  The Pygmies had tremendous respect for their old folks, who remained tightly integrated in society, and never retired.  The elderly provided valuable services like arbitration, babysitting, teaching, counseling, and guarding the camp.

As they lived, Pygmies moved from joyful childhood to joyful youth to joyful adulthood to joyful old age.  “They discover that each stage of life is rich, but that the next stage is even richer; nothing is lost.”  Turnbull learned huge lessons from them.  It’s gratifying to see how he learned, healed, and grew in the second half of his life.  Turnbull gave us a precious gift — the awareness of other modes of living that are far healthier than our own, rooted in social responsibility, functional communities, and spiritual connection to the family of life.